Cairo Killings Not Linked to Terror Campaign, Officials Say : Egypt: Musician who shot two Americans and a French jurist had a history of mental problems. Tourism is expected to suffer, however.

An unemployed musician who opened fire on a crowd of diners at a luxury hotel on the Nile River is not believed to be connected to Islamic fundamentalists waging a campaign of terror against Egypt’s troubled tourist industry, officials said Wednesday.

Discounting reports that the man was shouting slogans about God and the plight of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Muslims, police and tourism officials said the attack appeared to be an isolated incident committed by a man with a history of mental problems.

“I have a photo of the guy in front of me. . . . He has long, red hair. He looks like a typical playboy in nightclubs, nothing to do with terrorists,” Minister of Tourism Mamdouh Beltagui said in an interview.

Two American businessmen and an eminent French jurist were killed in the Tuesday night attack. Three others--a Syrian, an American and an Italian--were injured, the Italian critically. The two dead Americans were identified by the U.S. Embassy as Coby Hoffman, 44, and Robert Guidi, 45, both New Jersey employees of an oil service company.

The Frenchman, Fernand Bouland, 45, was former dean of law at Aix-en-Provence University in southern France and mayor of the French town of Chateauneuf-le-Rouge.

He was in Cairo with hundreds of other lawyers and judges attending a conference at the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel, sponsored by the Egyptian Assn. of Criminal Law.

The attack occurred at one of Cairo’s premier hotels, a luxury high-rise along the Nile that just two weeks earlier had been the scene of the opening round of official talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Outside the same hotel, Egypt’s former Parliament speaker, Rifaat Mahgoub, was gunned down by Islamic extremists in 1990.

Nearly 200 people have been killed in the past 18 months in Egypt since Islamic fundamentalists unleashed their latest wave of violence aimed at toppling the government of President Hosni Mubarak.

The dead have included three foreign tourists targeted in a highly publicized campaign to demolish Egypt’s $3-billion-a-year tourist industry, the country’s most important source of revenue.

The industry was beginning to recover from a crippling slump in recent months as attacks seemed to move away from foreigners and focus on Egyptian citizens and security officials. The domestic campaign continued Wednesday, when suspected Muslim extremists killed a police officer in front of his house in southern Egypt.

Tourism officials were gloomy about the possible effects of the latest attack. Already, at the beginning of the normally lucrative winter season, hotel occupancy is down to 60% from its normal 70%, officials said.

“All the hotels in Cairo have been suffering from (low) occupancy. We were hoping for a much better season in the next few months, and of course we don’t know how this incident is going to affect it,” said Nabila Samek, public relations director at the Semiramis Intercontinental.

Beltagui, newly appointed tourism minister, said overall tourism rates are down only 19.5% from 1992, the most lucrative year in Egypt’s history.

“Occupancy has been picking up, and we are hopeful that it will continue,” he said. “I think people have realized that although the loss of three tourists is very sad, it is less than one-millionth of the 3.2 million tourists we had in 1992.”

Mubarak, in the middle of a U.S. visit to promote the Middle East peace process and continued U.S. aid to Egypt, has emphasized the safety of Egypt as a tourist destination, and a local newspaper publicizing his trip this week carried a banner headline on the president’s remarks, “Egypt Safest Place on Earth.”

“The violence is going down now, and our country is much more safe than any other place in the world,” Mubarak told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

The incident clearly was an embarrassment for the government, but authorities on Wednesday discounted government press reports that quoted eyewitnesses as saying the gunman had shouted “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) and slogans about Bosnian Muslims before opening fire on diners at the Semiramis’ Falouka Brasserie restaurant.

The hotel’s security director, Hamada Ashoush, said in an interview that the investigation did not produce any evidence that the gunman, identified as Saber Farahat abu Ela, 28, had any kind of assistance that would indicate the attack was coordinated by an extremist group.

“After he did what he did, he threw his gun on the floor and asked someone to call the police. If this was a terrorist attack, the man would have had a backup or would have tried to escape,” Ashoush said. “I think since he was an unemployed musician, he must have been going through a rough time.”

The Ministry of Interior, which is responsible for the country’s security forces, said Ela had earlier been discharged from the army because he was mentally unbalanced. It said the weapon used in the attack was a licensed firearm that belonged to the gunman’s father and had been taken without his knowledge.

Times researcher Aly Assem contributed to this report.